History Online - Byzantine

The Byzantine Empire fell in 1453. The last Franks defended the Acropolis for some time; however, infuriated by the stubborn resistance of this strong fortress, Omar ordered artillery to shell (!) the Acropolis and its surroundings, due to which its temples, and the Acropolis itself, were turned into ruins [77].

The powerful destruction of many a wonderful monument of the crusaders' epoch led to the Athenian ruins then declared to be "ancient".

Gregorovius writes that after the 15th-century Turkish invasion, Athens was again (and how many times it was!) immersed into darkness. During the Turkish yoke, the historian of Athens and Greece faces a problem as difficult as ungratifying. He sees a desert before him [77]. The West has accepted the fall of Greece, and almost forgot it. A German humanist confined himself to a note in 1493 that the city of Athens was most glorious in Attica, from which only few traces remained. In the 16th century, it became necessary for science to possess exact information regarding the fate of the glorious city, which found its expression in the problem whether Athens existed at all. The question was raised by one German philhellene, Martinus Crusius. By rediscovering Athens he made himself immortal. He sent a letter to Zugomalas Theodosios, chancellor of the patriarch of Constantinople in 1573, asking to inform him whether the mother of all knowledge, as stated by the German historians, does exist, that the city of Athens was effaced, with just a few sailors' huts in its place. The reply of the enlightened Byzantine together with the later letter of an Acharnian were the first exact data which calmed the German scientist as regards the existence of the city. For the first time, they cast a dim light on the state of its monuments and the flora of its people (in which, according to traditional history, the legend is enrooted that the Parthenon was erected by the architects Ictinus and Callicrates under the statesman and strategos Pericles, the popular leader of the democratic party created in Athens as far back as the 5th century B.C. and who died of the plague in 429 B.C. together with its leader, although it is unknown in which month-A.F.) [77].

The scientific archaeology of Athens started only in the 17th century when Scaliger's chronology had already been created with the works of Jean le Maire from the Netherlands [77]. Nevertheless-let me refer to Gregorovius again- even in 1835, one German scientist expressed the opinion that an uninhabited desert had remained in place of Athens for four hundred years. Compared with the study of the city of Rome, the archaeology of Athens was about two centuries late.

The prejudice firmly enrooted in Europe that Athens did not exist, as it were, could be eliminated only with one's own eyes: This was to the credit of the French Jesuits and Capuchins, who first appeared in Athens in 1645 [77]. In the second half of the 17th century, the French monks made the first (!) maps of the city. The continuous and more or less scientific study of Athens j began only at this moment when traditional chronology had been almost' created, and the Greek monuments had already been dated on the basis of the distorted chronology of Rome, which also led to lengthening Greek history' artificially.